A leading Fortune 500 entertainment company, the largest in the US, provides entertainment services at over 50 venues in multiple countries with over 50,000 employees. When they needed to complete a migration from IBM CM8 to IBM Content Manager OnDemand (CMOD) in addition to rectifying existing issues with improperly formatted reports, they turned to Helix International.
Fortune 500 Entertainment Company
Entertainment
This entertainment company had more than 90 million DOCX documents to be processed for viewing in CMOD, totaling 70TB, and 75 million additional documents for migration from CM8 to CMOD, totaling 150TB. Almost all of this data was highly sensitive, meaning offline migration hardware services with end-to-end encryption both in motion and at rest were required.
Most data was static, including invoices, credit applications, print runs, and other regulated documents and reports. These records were to be very infrequently accessed and never changed but must be ready for quick location and reference.
All of this data had to be made available for rapid federated search across various storage locations and formats, with support for search based on metadata or filters. Upon locating the relevant data from potentially different places, the data would be packaged into any selected document format, such as PDF or AFP, with compliant branding and legal information applied and then served on demand. This would enable internal user self-service.
Further complicating this project was a customer's need to control document scanning template access at the employee level, as only certain employees are legally authorized to scan certain types of documents, such as photo ID and credit applications. Said applications were then automatically forwarded for rapid review by backend underwriters and, upon underwriter approval, ingested in CMOD to provide fast fulfillment for walk-in credit applicants.
The source data lacked organization, necessitating the preprocessing of metadata before ingestion into CMOD. This involved approximately 20 million exceptions (documents and reports with existing errors, such as improper formatting, unsupported output formats, missing database pointers, and database pointers pointing to files and reports that don't exist). Validating the accuracy of the post-processing metadata proved a significant challenge, as well as inconsistent date formats requiring comprehensive format translations. As the source documents' MIME types were improperly stored in CM8, a new preprocessor was necessary to identify and correctly ingest the source MIME types into the target system.
Finally, due to the massive amount of data and legal implications that would arise should any discrepancies, errors, or loss of data integrity occur, this entertainment company required a comprehensive audit trail with a full chain of custody for every unit of data touched throughout the project.
Helix International migrated the entire CM8 repository at the customer's selection, leaving all content in the new CMOD repository. This created a Single Source of Truth (SSoT) for the customer. It is now accessible to their many properties, departments, and functional groups worldwide across the continental US and offshore teams.
More than 220TB of compressed data was successfully discovered, extracted, normalized, and optimized by the Helix Massive Archival Retrieval System (MARS) migration platform.
The 90 million DOCX documents were formatted for viewing within CMOD. All content was successfully migrated while maintaining end-to-end data encryption, both in motion and at rest, and an audit database with a complete chain of custody of every unit of data over the entire project.
The 20+ million exceptions were all resolved, and a preprocessor was purpose-built to fix the improperly formatted MIME types.
The customer expressed satisfaction with resolving the exceptions and providing the solutions. Quoted by their Lead Project Manager: "I'll take this opportunity to thank all parties involved who were all crucial to the completion of this complex and arduous set of activities – it was a long and winding road – as most migration projects are! Thanks again all for your vital contributions!"
As a result of this project, the customer enjoys the following benefits:
Helix International was uniquely qualified to solve this entertainment company's needs due to the proprietary Helix MARS migration platform. While alternative options do exist, the Helix MARS platform features several unique and differentiating advantages, such as the ability to extract, read, normalize, and manipulate data from archives without decompression. The platform includes 55+ unique source extractors for every legacy ECM commonly employed by enterprises.
Additionally, the Helix MARS platform features the proprietary RTV program and RESTful APIs, which allow for records data to be viewed in any format without need of migrating the data, and without need of the legacy ECM, viewer, or any of the associated licenses. This unique approach to ECM migrations and retirement of legacy ECM solutions has saved over one billion dollars to date for more than 500 enterprises, and is one of the many reasons why Helix International is IBM's premium partner of choice for ECM, ETL, and ESB projects.
Massive savings in storage and compute costs. Our 500+ enterprise customers often cut their cloud bill in half or shut down entire data centers after implementing our solutions
